Both people asked not to be identified, citing privacy concerns.
The west side, on the other hand, is densely populated and residents tend to be poorer and born outside the United States. According to U.S. Census data, nearly half of West Side households earn about $55,000 a year or less, making many of them eligible for free or reduced-price meals in California schools, in compared to 19 percent of east side homes.
Norell Martínez, a 60-year-old English and Chicano studies teacher, has lived on the west side of Chula Vista her entire life. A first-generation immigrant, her parents emigrated from Tijuana, Mexico, to Chula Vista when she was one year old. “Many people on the west side share similar backgrounds as me; It is a diverse community,” says she Martínez.
Some of the blocks in Chula Vista with the greatest exposure to drones are located near the launch sites, which happens to be where Martínez lives: a block and a half from police headquarters on a street that is among the safest in the country. West Side. However, since July 2021, drones have flown over the area at least 959 times, accumulating almost five hours of images of the sky above their block.
Before the drone program began, he says, his neighborhood was quiet. Now the sound of its rotors keeps her awake at night. “We pay a lot of money and make a lot of sacrifices to have a small property that is ours,” she says. “It seems as if our house is no longer ours. “It’s like he belongs to the Chula Vista Police Department.”
In September 2016, Police in El Cajon, a small town northeast of Chula Vista, shot and killed an unarmed man named Alfred Olango. His sister had called the police because Olango, who had a history of mental illness, was acting erratically. “I called them to help me, not to come and kill him,” he cries. on a Facebook Live video filmed in the parking lot of the shopping center where minutes earlier officers had shot his brother. “Why couldn’t you taser him? I told you he was sick.”
The incident, which sparked widespread protests, would become a central element of the CVPD’s story of how its Drone as First Responder program came to life. “Would this have impeded the ability to have eyes on this incident before uniformed officers arrived?” Retired Captain William “Fritz” Reber, the architect of the Chula Vista drone program, he wrote in an October 2019 blog post about the DFR program for the police publication Police1.
However, it appears the city was considering deploying drones long before Olango was killed by police. Public records and CVPD statements show that police formed an Unmanned Aerial Systems Committee to “study the use of technology in their public safety operations” in December 2015, nearly a year before Olango’s death.
UAS Committee meeting minutes, obtained through a public records request, show that it met three times beginning in September 2016 to discuss logistics and plan implementation of the DFR program. From the beginning, community involvement and a press strategy were central to their approach. “We need to be more inclusive of the media and community,” reads a note from a November 2016 meeting. “This must be done to avoid any appearance of deception or secrecy.” At a Sept. 14 meeting, the committee scheduled its first public forum for a date nearly two weeks later: Sept. 27, the day Olango was killed by police.
City officials say that before launching the program, CVPD received “strong community support” during public forums where it detailed plans for the DFR program. The CVPD did not respond to detailed questions about its community outreach before launching the program and has yet to fully respond to WIRED’s request for records from these forums.
